What's that sound?

Good day one and all. A blog post with some new content, how strange I hear you cry from the rooftops.
Here's a little activity I love to do with all ages and levels. It's on of the more interactive, tactile, jumpy around activities we talked about at the conference on Saturday.
I like to choose my two sounds from the minimal pairs list. (Check the slides on the STRIP PowerPoint #jazzhands)Next I stick them on either side of the room and elicit what each sound is and draw students attention to their mouth shape when using the words.

The next step for my is to run through the words I am about to use in the activity. I usually do this with a simple slide and some coloured board markers. I get students to work in pairs and decide which colour is which sound. With the slide pìctures you can see two examples.

When the students are up to scratch with the words, their sounds and meanings I split the class into two or three groups.  There is a team leader who picks the words (which have been cut up and put in a cup) then they say the word to the next memeber of the team. Player two attaches a piece of blue tac to the word and passes it to player three. Again repeating the word. Player three then must say the word and stick it under the relevant phoneme stuck on the wall without looking at it.

When the time is up students sit down and check each others answers. The winning team is the one with the most correct answers. to push the students a little further I give them three minutes to then write a sentence or paragraph using as many of the words freom the previous activity. After three minutes each group has to read their sentnnces aloud.

I've found this last bit of drilling, in context, really helps improve the use of the sounds in question and since i've implemented this final part I've seen far fewer mistakes in the pron. Especially with the 3: sound. No longer do students talk about their beerday and their birthday is something we can all talk about together.

right that's all for today. It's great to be back blogging again. With some real content. I hope you find it of some use.

til the next tim

S.T.R.I.P

A massive thanks to all of those who came to my presentation yesterday. I had a really great time doing the presentation.

As I said the materials are just across if you follow the link to 'even more materials' there is a whole bunch of other guff in there as well. Fell free to steal, adapt use and abuse whatever you desire. 

I'll be posting a slightly updated version of yesterday's PowerPoint when I get to work tomorrow with the two new activities I added. 

If anyone wants a handout with a quick reminder of any of the games. Just let me know. 

Twitter business: @EFLuencyfella

Gigantic piles of gratitude to all y'all who fought the temptation of staying in the bar for one more hour and coming along. You guys made it what it was.

Esl love.

H

ACEIA

Almost set for the big day tomorrow. Just putting a couple of finishing touches to the presentation . Some fun with minimal pairs and a wee bit of rushing around. 

Come along tomorrow to see what the fuss is about. 

Who else will you be watching. I'll be in the queue first thing for Chris Roland's talk. Anyone else caught your eye?

See you tomorrow.

Just around the corner

With ACEIA just days away I've uploaded all of the content from my talk onto the link to the right (just a few materials.)
The talk has evolved ever so slightly so for all y'all who saw it at TEFL del Sur, there are some new treats and one or two changes and additions.

If you're at the conference this weekend. I assure you it's worth staying until the end. I'll treat you to a spectacular somewhat akin to a live Muse concert. Ok, that might be a bit of a lie, there will be no fireworks aside the metophorical ones flying around the room.

ACEIA 2014

With a just a week to go to the 2014 ACEIA conference I had a shot at impressing my new colleagues at Eli nervion today. I gave them a snippet of next week's talk. For anyone in the area why not come along. It will be full of sessions packed with ideas a plenty. Especially the last slot. You guess it that's mine.

I'll be making a concerted effort to get back to b logging now. With the summer over, an amazing wedding down, a house moved into, a job changed and finally getting used to the pace of an infant who now knows how to walk, I should soon be getting back to a more regular blogging pattern. 

That is all.

Til the next time.

H

Exciting News

I´ll be speaking at TEFL del Sur tomorrow, for all of you there who want some bits and bobs from the talk they´re all available from the link across there --------->
I´ll be uploading each activity over the next few weeks. Well it might take me longer as I have the small matter of marrying the most amazing woman in the world on 25th of May.

'til the next time.

Sporcle and Reported Speech

Happy Friday one and all. Just a few more hours 'til the weekend and for many of us the promise of a nice week off. Thanks easter.

As far as I can see, when we get to this stage of the year most text books throw up the idea of reported speech with varying degrees of difficulty.

There are a myriad of games to allow your students to practice their newq found skill. One I was introduced to a couple of days ago tests your students movie knowledge, their ability to transalte from the language they first saw the movie and then how to convert some of the most famous quotes in movie history into reported speech.

Your students level will, obviously, dictate the difficulty of the task, the reporting verbs they use and whether they chuck a few adverbs in there as well.

The first step is to get onto the fantastic  http://www.sporcle.com/games/happy101/best-movie-quotes-images then run through each of the images to identify which movies the quotes come from.

Step two, hit the timer and get the students to take turns in giving you a quote to one of the movies on the screen. 

Seven minutes later the time will have run out and all the missing quotes will be revealed and the students will have a chance to take the famous quotes and report them to their classmates.  

This works as a wonderful cooler after going through the "rules" of reported speech or as a warmer in the next class to make sure they still have it down.. My students really enjoyed it.

 A big thanks to my colleague Neil for pointing me towards the quiz and sharing his idea with me. 

I hope your students find it as useful as mine did. 

Right that's all for today.  Have a great holiday whereever you may be. If you don't have a holiday just go ahead and have a great weekend.

For regular updates why not follow me on twitter @sirhofthebomb

Using Sporcle to Build Vocabulary

My colleagues and I at The English House are all frequent  users of http://www.sporcle.com/. It's a quiz website with quizzes for just about everything you can imagine. I'm just going to wizz through a couple of them today and ideas on how to use them in your class. I normally use them as a warmer or cooler. Not to mention as a filler.
As I said before there are a plethora of quizzes on just about every subject under the sun. What's great is there are a whole bunch of vocabulary quizzes which can be really great in the classroom. I've used lots of general knowledge quizzes as a reward for good work on a number of occasions too.

The first pair of games I'm going to cover both involve the use of common suffixes. The Spanish favourite      -ation and the forever common -ish. The links are below.
http://www.sporcle.com/games/naqwerty3/sporclation-nation

http://www.sporcle.com/games/TheLoir/word-ends-in-ish

What I like to do with the words first is put them on the board and give the students 5 minutes to look up the meaning of any they don't understand on their phones.


Next I set the clock running and see how many they get right. I only take their first answer though to stop the multiple guessers I almost always have. The results were really surprising the last time I did these games and four of the words actually came up in the very same class.

That's about it for now. I'll be back tomorrow with more sporcleicious ideas. Tomorrow's is a fantastic way to practice reported speech. A great idea my colleague Neil gave me just yesterday.

I'll catch you on the morrow.

H

Imagine if......

In the entire time I've been teaching Cambridge Exams; the main fear my students have had has always been around the Use of English exam. More specifically phrasal verbs and dependent prepositions.

In my never ending quest to eradicate this this fear and, more importantly, keep students talking and improving on their speaking. After all what is a language if all you can do it put the right word in a space and correctly guess a question with a 25% chance of getting it right with your eyes closed. I digress. What I came up with in the end was a simple idea which involves a lot of cutting up pieces of paper and the need for at least a sprinkle of imagination, on the student's part. 

First I put the class in pair then I get each pair to select for the four following catagories.  

1. A Name/Profession (x2 per pair)                                           
   
2. A Situation (x1)
3. Some recently studied phrasal verbs (x4)
4. Dependent prepositions (x4)

The next step is pretty simple. You hand it over to the students and get them to write a dialogue between these two people in their given situation, using all the phrasal verbs and dependent prepositions they have chosen. 

I've found this brings about a much greater understanding of the selected vocab and a good deal of laughter. 

I've added the printable version to the section at the top (just a few materials).

That's all for now peeps.

At school	On the tube, stuck in a tunnel
At church	In a bar
In an airport departure lounge	At a vegan food festival
In a bar	At a concert
At a police station	On a sinking ship
In a park	On a desert island
In the changing rooms at the gym	Stuck in a lift
In a bar	In a traffic jam
In the bus queue	In a sauna
At the supermarket	After an exam

Barak Obama	Adolf Hitler
Josef Stalin	Vincent Van Gogh
A Hairdresser	Pablo Picasso
Marilyn Monroe	Count Dracula
A computer technician	Albert Einstein
Dalai Lama	Russell Brand
Cristiano Ronaldo	Nelson Mandela
Lance Armstrong	Darth Vader
A doctor	Walter White
A teacher	Batman
Grow up	Hand out
Pick up	Think up
Stand out	Turn up
Stand up	Turn down
Look up	Get off
Think over	Get on
Come up with	Make up
Bring up	Break out
Look forward to	Work out
Drop in	Hang out

Depend on	Break from
Addicted to	Bored with
Admit to	Capable of
Think of	Successful in
Come from	Agree with
Argue about	Arrest for
Accuse of	Discuss with
Stop from…-ing	Explain to
Fear of	Congratulate on
Hope to	Rely on

20 Question.......Tags

Well, it's been a while hasn't it. Too long some might say. How on earth have we gone on with our lives without your frequent updates Harry? I don't know, but it seems you have and so have I.

I recently took my ESL presenter train, well bus,  off to Madrid for TESOL Spain 2014. Despite speaking at 09:30 on a balmy Sunday morning I got a pretty decent turn out, so thanks to everyone for showing your faces. Upon my return I've jumped right back into work and a mere three weeks later here I am, posting again.

There'll be a few more posts over the next few days because my brain has been simply overflowing with ideas.

This first one came about due to my students, who are all Spanish, constant use of the word No as a question tag. Try as I might I couldn't get through to them that, while English speakers do use no as a question tag, they really aren't "supposed" to. I also explained that in an exam situation they'd be looked upon in a much better light if they used the correct question tag. Or at the very least. Right?

The question tag unit in the book came at just the right time. I started by playing question tag dominoes. Which you can see below. I just cut them up and handed them around. It's a great introduction. (I'll add the downloadable doc to my the useful links above)

aren’t we?	You’re name’s Harry	isn’t it?	You’ve been here before
haven’t you?	Let’s make a move	shall we?	You didn’t see the film
did you?	She’ll be at the party	won’t she?	You couldn’t lend me five euros
could you?	You can speak Spanish	can’t you?	You haven’t seen Gavin anywhere
have you?	He’s bringing Barbara	isn’t he?	She won’t tell anyone
will she?	Give us a hand with this	will you?	We are all agreed

Next I did simple matching exercise. I used this one here:
http://www.englisch-hilfen.de/en/exercises/questions/question_tags.htm

Finally I got students to select the most obscure thing they could find in the room and played 20 questions with them. However, this time with tag questions. I started by giving them examples so they didn't get stuck on isn't it?

When the students felt they were getting closer I told them to change their intonation to a falling intonation to show they pretty much knew what it was but just wanted confirmation.

Here were a few of my examples.

We use it every day, don't we?

Marco has one in his bag, doesn't he?

It starts with a letter from the first half of the alphabet, doesn't it?


So that's all for now folks.

I'll be back in a couple of days with my newest activity Imagine if.... a great way to practice phrasal verbs and dependent propositions. Not to mention an imagination booster.

'til then.

H
Follow me on twitter for regular updates: @sirhofthebomb